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In the 1990s, Islamic political violence escalated dramatically, frequently embroiling broader publics in con®ict. In Algeria, the civil war between a nebulous Islamic insurgency and the military-backed regime led to more than 120,000 casualties, including substantial civilian deaths. The brutality of the con®ict, which included widespread massacres of women, children, and the elderly, captured international attention and raised concerns about the nature of Islamic activism. This violence was reproduced at lower levels throughout the Middle East, including Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, Libya, the Sudan , and Egypt. At the same time, a transnational network of radical Sala¤s loosely af¤liated with Osama bin Laden attacked U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia , Tanzania, Kenya, and Yemen. Bin Laden’s February 1998 fatwa (Islamic legal opinion) legitimizing attacks against U.S. military targets and civilians sparked nervous debates in Western circles about how to address rising levels of Islamic-sponsored terrorism, a debate given new urgency since the September 11 attacks. Outside the Middle East, Islamic groups engaged in violent forms of contention in China, South Africa, Eritrea, Kashmir, the Philippines, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Dagestan, rede¤ning the geography of violent Islamic struggles. Although radical tactics are at the fringe of Islamic movements, the growing use of violence in the 1990s raises important questions about Islamic activism and social movement contention. In particular, given the broad repertoire of contention, which includes preaching, religious lessons, social and welfare services, publications, and general da"wa (religious proselytizing) activities , why did a number of Islamists turn to violence? More generically, why do social movements utilize violence as contention, given other tactics? What explains cross-national and diachronic variance in the level of violence? 61 Two Violence as Contention in the Egyptian Islamic Movement Mohammed M. Hafez and Quintan Wiktorowicz In this chapter, we use the cycle of violence between Hosni Mubarak’s regime and the Gama"a Islamiyya in Egypt as a case study to explore some of these questions. Although episodes of Islamic violence have a history in Egypt, the most recent confrontations differ in scope. Running gun battles, bombings, assassinations, and ambushes claimed hundreds of lives between 1990 and 1998. Deaths included not only Islamists and agents of the state but also foreign nationals, intellectuals, civilians, and Coptic Christians. The cycle of violence culminated in the massacre of 58 tourists and 4 Egyptians by members of the Gama"a Islamiyya (henceforth Gama"a) in November 1997, shocking the entire nation, including the jailed leaders of the Gama"a who tried to distance themselves from the perpetrators. The attack marked the turning point in the low-intensity con®ict, and the number of deaths attributed to Islamic violence declined precipitously.1 This pause (or end), in turn, provides an opportunity to look back at the previous decade to explain the explosion in violent Islamic contention and why social movements turn to radical tactics. In contrast to popular views of Islamic radicals as fanatics engaged in irrational , deviant, unpredictable violence, we argue that violent contention is the result of tactical considerations informed by the realities of repressive contexts . Islamists engage in a rational calculus about tactical ef¤cacy and choose modes of contention they believe will facilitate objectives or protect their organizational and political gains. Violence is only one of myriad possibilities in repertoires of contention and becomes most likely where regimes attempt to crush Islamic activism through broad repressive measures that leave few alternatives . In Egypt, the cycle of violence began largely in response to a broad crackdown on the Islamic movement that ensnared moderates, radicals, and a number of tangential bystanders. The crackdown included arrests, hostage taking, torture, executions, and other forms of state violence. From this perspective, violent Islamic contention is produced not by ideational factors or unstable psychological mentalities but rather by exogenous contingencies created through state policy concerning Islamists. Particular Islamic groups may engage in violence irrespective of state actions, but the stability of tactics for these outlier groups cannot explain the overall level of violence nor its timing. Instead, we must examine the inputs into repertoire calculations that lead increasing numbers of activists toward the use of violence . This perspective does not entail an outright rejection of ideational explanations that focus on the ideology and beliefs of violent militants; rather, it serves as a corrective to long-standing traditions in research on Islamic activism that tend to highlight the role of ideational factors at the expense of structural imperatives and voluntarist dynamics. This study...

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